How to Homeschool Math: A long page full of my best tips on homeschooling math in a low-stress, creative, playful way. No matter which curriculum you use—unschoolers, too!
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My Let’s Play Math Sampler ebook contains short excerpts from my most popular books. You can get it for free!
Many homeschooling parents dream of a mathematical magic bullet — a game, app, or book that will help their children learn math and enjoy it.
As in life, so also in math, there is no magic solution.
Do you want your children to learn math and enjoy it? Teach them to be Math Makers.
When they create their own math, students build deep, personal connections to math concepts. They think about the relationships between numbers, shapes, and patterns. Math becomes personal.
Toys, hobbies, favorite stories — all can be fodder for math creation.
Let the child choose something to think about.
Make an “I Notice” list. How does that item relate to math? What patterns or shapes can you see?
Or how would the story characters use numbers in their daily lives? Would they cook, or go shopping? Might they build something? Would they decorate it with a design? What would they count or measure?
Make an “I Wonder” list. How many different ways might you turn the things you noticed into questions? What else might you ask?
Then turn one of your noticings or wonderings into a math story, poem, puzzle, drawing, or game. Create your own math. Share your creation with family and friends.
Join the Student Math Makers team. We’d love to add your math creation to our collection and share it with viewers all around the world!
Download a Math Makers Invitation and Submission Form below:
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This blog is reader-supported.
If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please join me on Patreon for mathy inspiration, tips, and an ever-growing archive of printable activities.
If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.
Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“Notice, Wonder, Create” copyright © 2021 by Denise Gaskins. Feature photo (top) by MI PHAM via Unsplash.com.
Last week, I mentioned my new project, the Student Math Makers Gallery where children and teens can share their original math creations with the world.
So this week, I’m offering inspiration to get your children’s creative juices flowing.
April is National Poetry Month, and it’s also Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month.
What better way to celebrate than writing math poetry?
Here are some examples…
When children create their own math, they build a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and relationships.
And it’s fun!
So take a break from your normal math program to play with creative math. Students can:
We have a few entries already in the Student Math Makers Gallery.
Click Here To Visit the Gallery
We’d love to add your students’ math to our collection and share it with viewers all around the world!
To submit a math creation, download a Math Makers Invitation and Submission Form below:
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This blog is reader-supported.
If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.
If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.
Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“New! Your Student Can Be a Math Maker” copyright © 2021 by Denise Gaskins. “Creating Math Puzzles by Sian Zelbo, the author of
Camp Logic, via NaturalMath.com.
Check out the latest carnival of playful math:
Each monthly Playful Math Education Blog Carnival brings you a great new collection of puzzles, math conversations, teaching tips, and all sorts of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine of mathematical adventures, helpful and inspiring no matter when you read them.
John put together this wonderful collection of mathematical games, art projects, books, math essays, puzzles, and more.
Click Here to Read the Carnival Blog
Continue reading Playful Math Carnival 145 via Math Hombre
Would anyone have guessed we’d still be under pandemic social restrictions after a year?
Certainly not me!
And now that spring is in the air … Well, at least it is in the northern hemisphere. Would that be called “Up Yonder,” as opposed to “Down Under”? … Anyway, whatever you call it, everyone is getting antsy. We’re all ready to be set free, whenever our governments give in.
To help your family keep busy through the final (we hope!) lockdowns, my publisher is offering a 30% discount coupon on everything at our Tabletop Academy Press online store.
That includes all my math books and playful activity guides, plus my daughter’s fantasy fiction epic, The Riddled Stone.
Enter STAYSAFE2021 at checkout.
(Expires March 31, 2021.)
Publication Day!
Prealgebra & Geometry: Math Games for Middle School hits the online bookstores today.
You can prepare your children for high school math by playing with positive and negative integers, number properties, mixed operations, algebraic functions, coordinate geometry, and more. Prealgebra & Geometry features 41 kid-tested games, offering a variety of challenges for students in 4–9th grades and beyond.
A true understanding of mathematics requires more than the ability to memorize procedures. This book helps your children learn to think mathematically, giving them a strong foundation for future learning.
And don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all the math you learned in school. I’ve included plenty of definitions and explanations throughout the book. It’s like having a painless math refresher course as you play.
Welcome to the 144th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
Bookmark this post, so you can take your time browsing.
There’s so much playful math to enjoy!
By tradition, we would start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 144th edition. But this time, I want to take a peek back at the history of our carnival.
But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Continue reading Playful Math Carnival 144: Anniversary Edition
Would you like to snag 100+ easy, no-prep resources for creative problem-solving, number play, math art, word problems, mini-essays, brainteasers, patterns, research projects, and much more?
Back the Math Rebels Kickstarter now, before it’s gone.
Pick up the free sample download on the Kickstarter page.
And have fun playing math with your kids!
It may look like Cimorene has lain down on the job, but don’t be fooled! She’s hard at work, creating a math investigation for your students to explore.
Cats know how important it can be for students to experiment with math and try new things. Playing with ideas is how kittens (and humans!) learn.
Cimorene wants you to know that the Make 100 Math Rebels Kickstarter offers a great way for human children to learn math through play. She encourages you to go watch the video and read all about the project.
Too often, school math can seem stiff and rigid. To children, it can feel like “Do what I say, whether it makes sense or not.” But cats know that kids are like kittens — they can make sense of ideas just fine if we give them time to play around.
So Cimorene says you should download the free sample journaling pages from the Math Rebels Kickstarter page. The beautiful parchment design makes doing math an adventure.
[The free download will always be there, even after the Kickstarter project ends.]
Make 100 Math Rebels Kickstarter
Cimorene’s math puzzle is a classic geometry problem from the ancient Kingdom of Cats: Squaring the Circle.
Draw a circle on your journal page. Can you draw a square (or rectangle) that has the same area?
How would you even begin such a task?
Notice Cimorene’s hint in the photo above: Try drawing the square that just touches the edges of your circle. (We call those just-touching lines “tangents” to the circle.)
The tangent square sets an upper limit on the area of the circle. You can see that any square that exactly matches the circle would have to be smaller than the tangent square.
We call that biggest-inside square “inscribed” in the circle. Any polygon whose corners all sit on the circle is an inscribed polygon.
After you have explored for awhile on your own, Cimorene has one more twist in her puzzle.
In the ancient Kingdom of Cats, the wise ones estimated the area of a circle this way:
Divide the width of the circle in thirds, and then in thirds again. (That is, cut the diameter into nine parts.) Draw a square with sides measured by eight such parts.
You can try this on your journaling page by drawing a circle that is nine squares wide. Then draw a square overlapping it, with sides that are eight squares in length.
Here’s a surprise: Cimorene’s puzzle isn’t really about squares, but about calculus.
The problem of Squaring the Circle is really a much bigger question: Finding the area of a square, rectangle, or other polygon is relatively easy, but how can we discover the area of a curved shape?
For a circle, the area is related to the number pi, which is the number of times you would have to walk across the circle to equal the distance of one time walking around it.
If you’d like to learn more about pi, get ready for a celebration: Pi Day is coming soon! Every year, millions of children celebrate math on March 14th, because if you write the date as 3/14, it’s the same as the first three digits of pi.
Find out more about playing with pi in my Pi Day Round-Up post.
You may also enjoy:
Cimorene would love to hear about your children’s experiences playing with math! Please share your story in the comments below.
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This blog is reader-supported.
If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.
If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal: paypal.me/DeniseGaskinsMath. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.
Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!
“Math Puzzle from the Ancient Kingdom of Cats” copyright © 2021by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of the post copyright © Denise Gaskins.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 